When I was a child - i.e., shortly before the extinction of the sabre-toothed cat - I remember a massive graffito scrawled across the facade of a seafront villa at Fond Ghadir, Sliema, on the site of today’s Gelateria Lungomare.
The words were: “IL-FUSELLU MIET, VITTMA LABURISTA.” (Please note the comma: a vandal with a head for punctuation is a rare thing indeed.)
Those words have since been hardwired into my consciousness, largely for two reasons. One, because of their sheer ambiguity. Ok, we will probably never know what message the graffito “artist” intended to impart with that sentence. My reading is that Il-Fusellu’s violent death in 1981 made of him some kind of “martyr” for the Labour cause, at least in the eyes of die-hard Mintoffjani. But the words themselves could just as easily be translated as: “Il-Fusellu died, a victim of Labour”... which most would agree means the very opposite.
The second reason those words stuck in my mind was that they remained on that wall for around 10 years. In fact they survived for as long as the villa itself; and it was only when the bulldozers came in the early 1990s – by which time the government had changed, and we had a new bunch of thugs running the show instead – that the spirit of Il-Fusellu was finally lain to rest.
But who was Il-Fusellu, I hear the young ones ask? Good question. I will leave it for historians to answer – when, that is, they overcome the cowardice which has kept them from actually writing the history of this country in the 1970s and 1980s – but what I will say in the meantime is this. Such was the terror in which Il-Fusellu was held in Sliema in those times, that his name alone proved to be untouchable for years after his death.
Three decades later, the time has come to revise such fatuous over-simplifications of history. I don’t know what Il-Fusellu was really like back then, except that he was a gangster like so many others, and that he seemed to enjoy special immunity to prosecution on account of his proximity to then Prime Minister Dom Mintoff, as well as ministers such as the late Lorry Sant.
However, I find it hard to believe that he was any worse (or better) than today’s crop of untouchables who still hold the country in the palm of their hands... also through proximity with government ministers and officials, (although of course it’s perfectly OK, because the government is Nationalist).
For let’s face it: Fusellu might have died “a victim of Socialism”; but he was hardly the first delinquent to ever terrorise Malta, and he certainly was not be the last.

***

Right. Time to refresh a few memories. Anyone recall how, just before the last election, a certain Gonzi, Lawrence, promised us that he would take full responsibility for the Malta Environment and Planning Authority?
Well, here’s a little test case for Dr Gonzi. Just last night I drove along the Coast Road in the direction of St Paul’s Bay. It was after 9pm, and the sea was pitch black. This was odd, because I was looking directly at an area where I knew – having viewed countless aerial images of the damn thing over the past couple of weeks – there was a large tuna fattening farm comprising 10 cages in all, each 50 metres in diameter. I also knew that its permit conditions required that the perimeter must be marked with illuminated buoys (for pretty obvious reasons). And yet, it was completely invisible: not a flash, not a shimmer, not the tiniest of twinkles.
And this is the least of the illegalities associated with Charles Azzopardi’s tuna ranch in St Paul’s Bay. Last Wednesday, this newspaper published a veritable litany of breached conditions since the farm was sanctioned in 2001. It’s in the wrong place. The Environmental Impact Assessment was carried out over a different stretch of seabed. It has two cages more than stipulated by the revised permit – which in turn allowed four more than originally envisaged. The moorings used are different from those originally approved. In a word, the entire farm is operating in direct defiance of Mepa’s permit conditions... and has been for around seven years.
What would happen, I wonder, in the case of a private villa built along the same lines, by someone with zero contacts or influence among Cabinet ministers? (For example, by a former Labour stalwart in the vicinity of Delimara..?) Well, you could rest assured that the owner would be served with an enforcement notice faster than you can say “GonziPN igib serhan il-mohh”; and Mepa would probably issue a press release to inform us all what a jolly good job it’s doing of protecting our environment.
Yeah, right. Back in the real world, it is not Mepa that calls the shots, but the owners of giant fish farms worth hundreds of millions of euros... especially when these just happen to be best buddies with Rural Affairs Ministers such as George Pullicino, and take their holidays in the company of (former) Mepa chairman Andrew Calleja.
Serhan il-mohh? That was an electoral promise too, and I think it’s high time Dr Gonzi delivered on it. If he really wants to restore public faith in this ailing institution called “Mepa”, I can think of no better way than to enforce the permit conditions of Charles Azzopardi’s tuna fattening ranch in St Paul’s Bay. It wouldn’t take much: just move the farm to the original (approved) location, switch on the lights at night, and suspend all tuna ranching activities until a proper EIA can be carried out. (Oh, and while he’s at it, the PM might also wish to correct seven years’ worth of false information supplied by his own government to the European Union regarding the farm’s actual capacity, which is over-declared by 1,000 metric tonnes. To a lesser or greater degree, the same also goes for the other five operational farms; and that’s not to mention the two non-existent ones, as well as that tiny, insignificant little detail regarding an unaccounted-for 5,000 tonnes of bluefin tuna exported to Japan last year...)
But Gonzi appears reluctant to take any form of action where Charles Azzopardi is concerned... and he is not the only one.
Two months ago, the same Charles Azzopardi was the subject of an inquiry carried out upon orders by Transport Minister Austin Gatt. Naively, I thought at the time that Gatt had acted upon hearing of the alleged irregularity. Having read the final report, I now know that this is not the case at all. The original allegations were made on April 22, and it was only on May 19 that the inquiry was ordered... and even then, only because of pressure by the European Commissioner for Fisheries, Joe Borg.
To cut a very long story short, the Board of Inquiry concluded on June 10 that the owners of Hannibal Fishing Ltd - who happen to also be the owners of the above-mentioned fish farm - had supplied false documents to both the Malta Maritime Authority and the Fisheries Directorate, in order to circumvent international shipping and fishing regulations for reasons which are too complicated to go into here.
And again I ask: what would happen to a lesser mortal such as you and I in the same situation? I shudder to think. But George Pullicino’s special friends get different treatment from the rest of us. In fact, the incriminating report has been gathering dust in the offices of the Attorney General for two months, and will no doubt remain there until summer gives way to autumn, and the whole messy affair is forgotten.
Coming back briefly to Il-Fusellu, and that beautifully ambiguous obituary of his. I am now in a position to confirm that at least the first part of that sentence – “IL-FUSELLU MIET” – is correct. For Il-Fusellu is well and truly dead, and with him also died the old, tired myth that the Nationalists today are somehow better, wiser, cleaner or less corrupt than the Labour miscreants they have risen to replace.
As Dr Zeuss so ably put it: “One fish, two fish, red fish, blue fish...”